O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d

His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

William Shakespeare. Hamlet. Act i. Sc.2

Samson crushed himself and his enemies to death beneath the ruins of a building. He can
only be excused on the grounds that the Spirit of the Lord, who wrought miracles through
him, had bidden him to do so. But, apart from such men excepted by the command of a just
law in general or of God, the very Source of justice, in a special case, any one who kills
a human being, himself or another, is guilty of murder.St Augustine, City of God, Book 1,
Chapter 21, Image Books, Doubleday,1958:

It is significant that in Holy Scripture no passage can be found enjoining or
permitting suicide either in order to hasten our entry into immortality or to void or
avoid temporal evils. God’s command, "thou shalt not kill," is to be taken
as forbidding self-destruction, especially as it does not add ‘thy neighbor,’ as
it does when it forbids false witness, ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against
they neighbor,’ However, no one should think he is guiltless when be bears false
witness against himself, since the duty to love one’s neighbor is measured by the
love of oneself, as it is written, "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."
St. Augustine, City of God, Chapter 20

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging
whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of
philosophy. — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1955)

—

Graham J Weeks

http://www.weeks-g.dircon.co.uk/ My
homepage of quotations